Elizabeth Bradfield

First

Calm, so we stop at Charcot. No one’s been, but there are rookeries, stories, views, so why not see. Been on how long now? Six weeks? Seven? Low light. Red coats march uphill. My orange stationed alone at the flagged path’s foot. Unsure of what I’ve traveled, seen, perhaps earned. But now the moment: most forbidden & natural act of my time here.

[3] When applying for an National Science Foundation grant for the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, I learned that if I were to camp out on the ice, I’d not only have to bring back all solid waste, but all liquid waste as well. “Pishing” is a nod to Bashō who describes, in poem 31 of Back Roads to Far Towns, the fleas and lice and horse urinating by his pillow. In the 1968 Grossman Publishers translation by Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu, this action is rendered as “pishing.”

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Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collections Once Removed, Approaching Ice, and Interpretive Work. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, West Branch, Orion and many anthologies. She has been awarded a Stegner Fellowship, the Audre Lorde Prize, and was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she lives on Cape Cod, works as a naturalist locally as well as on expedition ships in the polar regions, and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University.http://www.ebradfield.com